Kodachrome is going away.
Haven't used it in a long while. But I still get a nostalgia pang, partly because of the song. But it's a small pang. I love my digital camera and the thousands of pictures I've taken at virtually zero marginal cost.
The greens of summers
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>>Ah, but professor, you've forgotten to include the cost of time. That is the time it now takes you to look thru the thousands of pictures to find the few you'd like to actually use.<<
He did write the word "virtually" before writing zero marginal cost.
James, good catch. But I was really just kidding him a bit anyway.
Why are you taking bad pictures? Shooting on film makes me take only the best pictures I can (unless I'm experimenting with tricky exposures), because I have the incentive to get it right in the camera. I've heard digital photographers say that shooting digital made them lazier. I also think that digital photographers, for the most part, don't pay nearly as much attention to exposure and composition as those of us who still shoot on film. Probably because they treat the camera like a video camera, finding shots through the viewfinder rather than with their eyes, using auto exposure, etc.
I'm not trashing digital photography or digital photographers, digital has come a long, long way in the past ten years, and the day I can no longer get quality affordable prints locally I'll save up for a good DSLR, BUT a true cost benefit analysis shows that digital actually comes at quite a high cost. I could shoot dozens of rolls of film (and 90% of those would be shots I like and want to keep) and have high-quality digital scans on CD for the cost of just the DSLR. Not to mention the cost of forgoing photography while I'm saving up (this assumes I have a relatively fixed photography budget, which I kinda do).
Anyway, after sunk costs, yeah, the marginal cost is low (assuming you don't want quality prints of your digital photos), but PRE-sunk costs it's pretty high and the camera doesn't start "paying for itself" for longer than you might think.
FWIW: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rafterman2009/
Kodachrome has some pretty nasty chemistry as I recall.
Surely Congress can bail out Kodak and force it to manufacture Kodachrome.
I take many more pictures than I did with film, like you, because the "marginal cost" is zero.
Ah, but professor, you'ver forgotten to include the cost of time. That is the time it now takes you to look thru the thousands of pictures to find the few you'd like to actually use.
Time that may be better spent.
My brother, a fine amateur photographer, also (mildly) laments the end of kodachrome, and post the last picture he ever took with it, of a bison grazing on the Madison River in Yellowstone National Park.